Significant growth in VCSEL-based short-reach optical links is anticipated for data centers and consumer devices markets. An innovative photonic package design for optical transceivers is needed to address the anticipated growth, and to facilitate market's adoption of optical transceivers.
There are two major approaches to package optoelectronic components for an optical transceiver module. One makes use of a metal-can package with a transparent window to hermetically seal active optoelectronic elements, suffering from the drawbacks of high cost on package submount, non-efficiency on individual piece production, low accuracy manual alignment, and etc.; another directly bonds active optical components and driver ICs onto a printed circuit board (PCB), suffering from the drawbacks of individual piece handling on polymer lens assembly and burning in testing. A high precision package structure is desired for optical components and driver ICs. It is further desired to have a manufacturing process of the package structure that supports batch production, ensures high accuracy alignment, provides hermetic package, and has high throughput.